To think This Is Going To Hurt is awful to women?

[justanoldhack]

Watching the show and can't help but shake a really uncomfortable feeling that its writer just...really doesn't like women.

I get that doctors are super overstretched, so tired, giving the job everything at the expense of their personal lives. I also get that it's a 'comedy' and not real, although it is based on his true life experiences.

But the way the women are portrayed as silly, a nuisance, stupid, battleaxes, or simply a vessel that 'covers his pubes in blood'... feels so off. These are women at one of the most vulnerable moments in their lives, but they're just props, the butt of the jokes. I can't shake the feeling that Adam Kay really, really doesn't like women. Definitely does not respect them.

Thanks goodness, I guess, that he's not longer practicing medicine. And not surprised either to learn that when he was younger he wrote 'comedy' songs about babies with Down's Syndrome and women from the North.

Oh and those of you who are slating AK for making money out of women's suffering should have read the rest of the Mail article. He's raised over £700,000 for NHS charities and the Lullaby Trust.

The real villain of the piece is his consultant, promising a bung for filling in for him while he's 'stuck in traffic', nudge-nudge wink-wink, on his Mediterranean holiday. And, of course, telling him and Shruti to lie on their reports and then dropping them in the shit.

My own experience as a patient on the other side from been an HCP was an eye opener when I lost my 2nd baby. I was a high risk pregnancy so under obstetric care. I had a wonderful obstetrician, male, which obviously on this thread is relevant. He listened to me, followed and respected ALL of my wishes in a very complex high risk pregnancy. However when I had a placental abruption in the early part of my 3rd trimester I had the Obs on call, a women. She was a horror and showed absolutely zero respect for my wishes right down to scanning me prior to me going to theatre. I had been asked my the Registrar if I wished to know if my baby still had a heart beat I said no I did not want to know now. The consultant just looked me in the eyes and told me that there's no heart beat while I was bleeding out. This is one amongst many examples!

Anyway I guess my point here is I don't always think it's as simple to call out misogyny and sexism, it certainly exits in the medical world, but sometimes it's just a plain and simple total lack of respect for the patient who is considered subservient under the god like premise of a Doctor!

It is heartening to see more and more people call out the misogyny, including quite a few midwives. Also saw a male obgyn doctor call it out as misogynistic which was a surprise as all the backlash Id seen until that point was 100% women.

I think Kay was wholly unsuited to a medical career - he more or less admits this, saying it was just expected he would follow the family into it.

I work with some medical students, and this is true for too many of them. There are lots of hoops to be jumped through to get to study Medicine, and too many unsuitable people are forced through them and end up in the wrong job.

@Thymeout

Oh and those of you who are slating AK for making money out of women's suffering should have read the rest of the Mail article. He's raised over £700,000 for NHS charities and the Lullaby Trust.

The real villain of the piece is his consultant, promising a bung for filling in for him while he's 'stuck in traffic', nudge-nudge wink-wink, on his Mediterranean holiday. And, of course, telling him and Shruti to lie on their reports and then dropping them in the shit.

That’s a great thing he’s done there. However it doesn’t excuse, negate or cancel out his behaviour at other times - his misogyny, lack of compassion and negligence

It would be interesting to hear from any of his patients. Rather than hating women I saw it (the books) as gallows humour, be that right or wrong. It does feel wrong but we are also expecting doctors to cope with so much. They are pushed beyond their limits and see so much crap. A friend of a friend is a doctor and struggles with the way other doctors look at their complex patients. I thought Adam Kay left medicine to pursue comedy/fame when actually he left after a birth went horrifically wrong, the baby died and mum was in icu not expected to make it.

Gallows humour seems wrong to me but then I’m not the one dealing with that stuff. I’m not defending things but it sounds from his Downs Syndrome song like he doesn’t give a fuck about women, babies and terminations but in his second book he discussed doing a late termination due to a genetic condition and how he was struggling to hold it together but knew he had to for the mum as his pain was nothing like the mums. He was also shocked at the surgeons attitude but again the surgeon was doing what he had to do mentally

unherd.com/2022/02/adam-kays-dangerous-misogyny/
Agreed, this is a brilliant article especially for anyone needing a helping hand in recognising the misogyny of Adam Kay

@LuckySantangelo35

unherd.com/2022/02/adam-kays-dangerous-misogyny/ Agreed, this is a brilliant article especially for anyone needing a helping hand in recognising the misogyny of Adam Kay

A few angry men in the comments section it seems 🙄

@airbalonz
Absolutely!

@LuckySantangelo35

unherd.com/2022/02/adam-kays-dangerous-misogyny/ Agreed, this is a brilliant article especially for anyone needing a helping hand in recognising the misogyny of Adam Kay

“for anyone needing a hand in recognising [...]”

Rather than say having a difference of opinion?

Almost a bit condescending really? 😆

@LuckySantangelo35

unherd.com/2022/02/adam-kays-dangerous-misogyny/ Agreed, this is a brilliant article especially for anyone needing a helping hand in recognising the misogyny of Adam Kay

It’s really not.

I would be worried if people weren’t human and taking the piss out of a laminated 11-page birth plan quite frankly.

Same.

@Blossomtoes

I would be worried if people weren’t human and taking the piss out of a laminated 11-page birth plan quite frankly.

Same.

My birth plan for DC1 was a beautiful document.

My birth plan for DC2 was two sentences.

Well if the woman with a ‘coloured in 11 page laminated plan’ really existed I would be more interested to know her backstory, worries, fears that had lead to her seeking such detailed controlled. A lot of midwives have commented that long birth plans are often linked to past trauma.

But besides that point birth plans are generally just looking at the real things that can happen or go wrong, gaining knowledge and understanding what options there are in those scenarios. They are one of the ways for women to feel informed, seek to have boundaries and choice over what happens to them- precisely why men like Adam seek to undermine them.

@LittleBearPad why not?

@Ionlydomassiveones it’s what behind it though… what if that woman’s laminated birth plan was an outworking of past trauma, an attempt at gaining a sense of control over her body when shes had none which is such a common response to trauma. I don’t think anyone should ‘take the piss’ certainly doesn’t make them more ‘human’ for doing so

@airbalonz

Well if the woman with a ‘coloured in 11 page laminated plan’ really existed I would be more interested to know her backstory, worries, fears that had lead to her seeking such detailed controlled. A lot of midwives have commented that long birth plans are often linked to past trauma.

But besides that point birth plans are generally just looking at the real things that can happen or go wrong, gaining knowledge and understanding what options there are in those scenarios. They are one of the ways for women to feel informed, seek to have boundaries and choice over what happens to them- precisely why men like Adam seek to undermine them.

Couldn’t agree more

[quote LuckySantangelo35]@LittleBearPad why not?[/quote]
One anecdote exposes the depth of his self-deception. He sees a teenage girl who tried to trim her labia, because she thinks it is too big. Kay is horrified: “How long,” he asks, “until we are seeing girls stapling their vaginas tighter?” The answer is a year. His colleague meets a woman who superglued her vagina on her lover’s insistence, to make it tighter. Yet what woman reading his memoir could feel anything but horror for her own body, its secretions and its magic?

What in this extract shows Kay’s misogyny? There’s societal misogyny by the bucketload but Kay is horrified by what the teenager has done. His reaction is normal. It is a horrifying thing to have done.

What’s behind it is someone foolish or arrogant enough to think you can plan something as unpredictable as birth. My birth plan was that I and my baby would emerge the other side alive and in one piece. Unfortunately the second time no amount of planning would have made any difference. One of us didn’t make it.

Blossomtoes
I am so sorry to read this
💐 for you

@wealllovepj

Blossomtoes I am so sorry to read this 💐 for you

Thank you. That’s very kind of you.

I think he wrote a book that was accessible and witty enough to be read by people who wouldn't have read a harrowing expose. In doing so, he introduced a wide audience to the best and the worst of working for the NHS.

He has said many times that he could have written himself as a superhero but didn't, despite knowing he would be criticised for it. In the book, and in episode 5 of the series, Tracy tells him all of the ways that he has been negligent and he does not shy away from it.

He handles big issues with empathy and sensitivity. He doesn't joke about the teenager who cuts her labia, or the woman in an abusive relationship, or the older woman who dies alone and without a single visitor.

Instead we hear his internal monologue about lengthy birth plans, eating the placenta and calling your triplets names that rhyme.

And alongside those stories about women, there is also the awful (male) consultant, the comedian dad who won't stop joking in the delivery room, the dad that pees in the corner.

I don't see any misogyny just stories from his job, about men and women. And the very best people of course are Shruti and Tracy.

It’s funny how so many people can watch a show and get different things from it.

I didn’t get any of what OP has said from the program, I think it spoke volumes about the NHS and the way it’s run, going from midwives to the ones higher up.
Doctors seem to have an arrogance about them anyway especially in hospitals.

Didn’t think he hated women at all, I thought it was written and acted really well. Especially his speech in the last episode, gave a good message about the NHS and how stressful it is and the suicide rates, which aren’t spoken about.